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Darksiders Post-mortem Interview

If you read my Darksiders review, then you already know that I liked the game a lot. Playing through it, though, left me with a lot of questions about how it originated, how the team felt about being compared to other games, and what the franchise's future could hold. To get the answers that would give me closure I recently interviewed David Adams, General Manger and Development Director of Vigil Games, and one of the key people responsible for Darksiders.

GameSpy: We liked Darksiders a lot, but were you all worried prior to its release? The game didn't seem to have a huge amount of public awareness going on, even though THQ had been aggressively marketing it.

David Adams: Yeah. I mean, we were a little worried. It's always been hard for us to portray what the game was about. Very early on, I think a lot of people looked down and thought, oh, that's another God of War game...

GameSpy: Right. Are you happy with the critical reception?

David Adams: Yeah, for the most part. [laughs]

GameSpy: Well, I mean, generally it's done pretty well for itself, especially for a studio's first game. I think that's one of the most impressive things...

David Adams: Yeah, absolutely. We're perfectionists, though, we'll want to overly top that in any subsequent game. But yeah, definitely. I think the fact that we're a first-time studio and this is our first project, we're definitely happy with how it came out.

GameSpy: How did the initial idea for Darksiders come to be?

David Adams: We were actually working on MMOs at the time. We kind of all... MMOs are fun, I love MMOs, but working on them... we wanted the reward of working on a console game. A game that has a beginning, an end, cool moments, some things you don't really get to do on an MMO. We talked about it a lot... we're huge, huge gamers, and we grew up [with] things like Metroid and Castlevania and Zelda. That was the era of cool, new action-adventure games. We really wanted to make a game like that.

GameSpy: Yeah, I was gonna say, the reviews -- and the PR to an extent, before it came out -- were comparing Darksiders to games like God of War and Zelda, but really emphasizing the Zelda, which didn't come through as much in the early demos. Did that bother you, that people aren't just talking about the game, but talking about it in the sense of, "oh, it reminds me of this." Or do you feel proud that you've created something that people appreciate, that's being compared to these games that are so beloved?

David Adams: I love Zelda. It's one of my favorite game franchises of all time. So, obviously, it's an amazing series, to be compared in the same sentence is an honor, as far as I'm concerned.

GameSpy: As far as some of the design decisions that went into the game, like the ability to stop time, the portal gun, how did you guys come to make those decisions about the items that would be included? It kind of comes across like, "these were great ideas in other games, now let's find a cool way to put that in our game."

David Adams: Yeah, the funny thing is, when we set out we started making the game like five years ago. We weren't in full development until the last three years, but it was originally four of us, and when we conceived the idea, a lot of the games that people claim we took our ideas from didn't even exist yet. Which is kind of funny. The God of War thing's funny because I didn't even play God of War until we were well into development. I love God of War, it's an awesome game, but obviously I think that, as a developer, you're naturally influenced by the other games you've played. But sometimes it is kind of funny, because we'll see an idea that we thought, it may have been influenced more by other games, but we had the original nugget of the idea before the game that supposedly we copied it from came out.

GameSpy: So the game features all kinds of crazy items and abilities, stopping time, portal guns like we said, as well as some things that are more reminiscent of Zelda, like the boomerang-style weapon. Are there any items that just didn't make it into the game?

David Adams: Yeah. Originally there were eight dungeons, so we had a lot more items. And there was this item we called the Venom of Apollyon, which was kind of like a sticky grenade -- there was a dungeon that was going to be based on light and dark, so that allowed you to create light in certain areas. There was another item, I can't remember what it was called actually, but it was pretty fleshed-out, it was actually functional at one point, but it allowed you to control these spirits of the dead, like an undead army. You used them to do different little tasks and stuff like that.

GameSpy: Did you have to scale anything back due to the scope of things you were attempting in Darksiders?

David Adams: Oh, yeah, I'll freely admit that. We've never made a console game. When we went into this game, our plan was way bigger than we could possibly execute. But that's cool, I think it's good to think big when you start out. Believe it or not, we had an actual bigger game design, with more mechanics, and we went in and spent time developing a lot of them. As we learned and we became more familiar with the console development process, we realized, "Oh, wait, we can't really do all this." Our initial idea was four-player co-op, just to give you an idea of how completely ridiculous it was...